INMATE: AWAITING EXECUTION IS ‘A LIVING DEATH’

My name is Kevin Cooper. I am a 55-year-old African American man on death row in California. I have been here, trying to prove my innocence, for 28 years.

In 2004, I came within hours of being executed, before the courts affirmed my right to have new evidence of my innocence reviewed. Most people can’t imagine what it is like to literally count the remaining minutes of their lives, but for those of us on death row, this is how our very existence is framed — bracketed by birth and the time we are strapped to a gurney and our veins are filled with poison.

Between the moment we are sentenced and our death date, we die a profound psychological and spiritual death. It is a living death. In a report released this week, the Center for Constitutional Rights and the International Federation for Human Rights detail abysmal human rights conditions on death row in Louisiana and California that they say amount to torture. What they write about, I have lived.

I spend most of each day inside of an 11-by-4½-foot box. California has 741 prisoners on death row, far more than any other state, and 65 percent of them are minorities. All but one death row prisoner in California is too poor to afford a private attorney, and we wait three to five years to have an attorney even appointed for our appeal. We spend an average of 20 years, first waiting for lawyers to be assigned to our cases, then waiting for the chance to show our innocence or challenge our sentence, and finally waiting for court decisions. Sixty death-row prisoners in California have died of natural causes while waiting for their case to wind through the courts. Twenty-three have committed suicide. Only 13 have been executed.

I wish you could understand the horror of living under the constant threat of death, each and every day, year after year, for decades. I have seen other prisoners turn into vegetables, become dependent on psychotropic medication, give up, or kill themselves. I’ve never known a death-row prisoner who has not, at some point, felt it was better just to volunteer for execution, in a desperate attempt to end this hell.

And yet, even living under a death sentence for years cannot compare to living under the threat of imminent execution on a certain date and time. Fifty-five days before my 2004 execution date, guards began monitoring me day and night, asking with perverse concern whether I was “all right,” and the lights were kept on in my cell 24 hours a day. In the ultimate irony, this was to ensure that I did not commit suicide and cheat the state out of killing me. I was repeatedly strip searched, sometimes several times a day. I was asked what I wanted for my last meal and what size clothes I wear, so that I could receive a brand-new set of clothes to be executed in. I made a will. I had my final photograph taken. I stood and watched the executioners take cotton swabs, alcohol pads, and other items into the execution chamber to use on me. I watched as they searched for my “good veins” to insert the needle.

I lived with this around the clock for nearly two months until, less than four hours before I was to die, I was abruptly taken from that pre-death chamber and returned to my cell as though nothing had happened. I was offered psychotropic drugs, which I declined. I have never received any other help recovering from that experience.

Executions in California are currently suspended while the state searches for a method of executing 741 people that won’t be struck down by the courts. But once they are resumed, I expect to be at the top of the list to be killed.

Not everyone here has come this close to the moment of execution. But all 741 of us live with the essential terror that we will one day learn we have only weeks to live. We will start a daily countdown to our last day. We will begin to go through that ghastly ritual of death. Then, in a month or two, we will be killed by our own government. How a country that claims to be a human rights leader can maintain this practice defies understanding — innocent or guilty, no one deserves this torture.

Cooper, who is on death row at San Quentin, was recently granted a hearing on his case before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the legal body of the Organization of American States. It will take place Oct. 28.